How TikTok, micro-dramas, and distracted viewers are reshaping TV

It’s no secret that the way we consume media these days is different than it was 10 years ago. Who doesn’t like to be on their phone while they’re watching TV? Well, Hollywood has noticed your attention is split. And as a result, individuals like Kris Jenner and companies like Disney are investing in new forms of entertainment.

Enter: the vertical micro-drama. Filmed quickly and with scrolling in mind, they are short episodes, sometimes as short as 45 seconds, intended to grab the viewer with over-the-top premises.

But that isn’t the only change. The magazine n+1 reported earlier this year that Netflix executives are asking their screenwriters to “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along” — in other words, dumb down the script so that inattentive viewers can still follow along.

So, is what we’re watching getting worse? Today, Explained co-host Noel King brought that question to Puck News correspondent Julia Alexander.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

When people in the industry talk about the second screen problem, what do they mean?

If you talk to creatives, the second screen — meaning, the phone that you’re watching TikToks on while watching a movie on your big TV — is just a lack of attention that is being paid to the main movie or film on the television.

But, if you talk to executives, the question of the second screen is one of: Does the adoration for TikTok, and Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts mean that people will spend less time with our streaming services that they’ll cancel, and we have to fight back for those subscribers? Before the phone came around, people would do this with magazines, and they would do it with books, and they would do it with other things. We’ve just never had as many things competing for such tiny slices of the attention pie.

There was reporting in n+1 saying that Netflix executives are telling writers to dumb down the writing in TV shows and movies. Do people who cover the industry, did they know that this was happening?

I think it’s important to clarify that no one, no executive is out [there] saying, “Dumb this down.” No executive is out in the town saying, “Hey, by the way, make shittier television that’s really going to help us when we increase prices again,” right?

What they’re saying, if this is being said to people — and I have personally never heard it in my reporting — what they would be saying is, “We understand that our audience has less attention than they might have 10 years ago, and our audience has more opportunities to put that attention on another video format, whether they’re watching Reels or TikTok. And we understand that that is our direct competitor in a way that someone flipping through a magazine while watching a movie was not going to be a direct competitor.”

It’s not about dumbing down, it’s about acknowledging where the future of competition is coming from.

Why do you think the idea of dumbing TV writing down makes us angry?

We all want to believe that we are of higher-quality caliber than in fact we are. I mean, I’d be outraged if someone came out and said, “Netflix is purposely dumbing stuff down.”

But, in reality, I was watching Frankenstein the other night with my fiance, and he was playing Candy Crush the entire time, and then, in a group chat the next day, he’s complaining about the quality of films. But, the quality of the film, such as Frankenstein, a beautiful Guillermo del Toro movie, has nothing to do with a Netflix executive coming out and saying, “You’ve got to dumb this down.” It has everything to do with the fact that they’re responding to what people are saying with their actions.

The Lindsay Lohan Christmas movies, for example, and all those other Netflix fare that we associate with a specific trope are heavily watched. One of the effects of what you’re seeing play out is that we had a golden age of television about 15 years ago, a lot of the bigger movie stars, and the writers, and directors in film who didn’t want to make Marvel movies and didn’t want to make big sci-fi blockbusters moved to TV. We had a great moment of well-written, gorgeous television.

Then, what happened was the competition for eyeballs on the TV screen started to really speed up, and you had YouTube come in, and you had Mr. Beast, and all of a sudden, people were watching them on their television screens, and that meant that they were watching less Netflix or less Hulu. So, all of the prestige TV that worked on cable 20 years ago stopped working as much today. So, you’re getting a lot more unintentional slop, but it’s not because they’re trying to produce it, it’s that they’re trying to produce just more content than ever before.

Could you envision a world where viewers say, “We don’t want the slop, we want prestige,” or is that unlikely?

I actually think that’s exactly what’s going to happen. The amount of generative AI content, even these micro-dramas a little bit, which, in part, are being made because of generative AI technologies that are allowing them to make things cheaper and faster, is going to increase the amount of content. We’re going to enter an infinite content era, and a lot of it’s going to be sloppy.

As humans who love good storytelling, we’re going to have to go figure out where it is. And we’re going to pay for it. And so, you might have an Apple TV plus or a Netflix in 20 years, 25 years, be $40, $50 a month, but you’ll pay for it, because they will end up leaning into higher-quality programming and backing away from some of the slop as it takes over all of our other content viewing. But, in order to get to that breaking point, things have to break a little bit further.

It is incredible to me that your take is so optimistic.

There is a world where YouTube will eat everyone’s lunch. It’s been happening; it’ll continue to happen. But, it’s never going to replace the need to watch a really good movie or a really good TV show.

Now, I think the number of those titles will come down, and I think that’s going to be really cataclysmic for people who work in this industry, because you’ll have fewer jobs. But, really, high-quality art has always stayed, and people have always sought it out. I really do believe that there’s a world for some of these streaming services — not all — some of these directors, and actors to continue to leave a really strong mark, but it’s going to be a much smaller industry than it has been over the last hundred years.